Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
Signed poster listed on Etsy by Deathink, owner of the Official Deathink Shop (last accessed October 18, 2021).
Content of the poster based on Rusty Cage’s Requiem of the Crazies comic series, posted on Dante Today here. Deathink’s “Virgil” cites Mandelbaum’s translation of Inferno 20.27-28: “Ancor se’ tu de li altri sciocchi? / Qui vive la pietà quand’ è ben morta.”
“Presented from October 5-31, the exhibit consists of 22 items from Special Collections, including a recently acquired 1520 exemplar of the Divine Comedy with commentary by Cristoforo Landino, one full-page woodcut illustration, and 98 smaller woodcuts introducing each canto. Also on view are various editions of Dante’s masterpiece in Italian and English, with illustrations by Gustave Doré and John Flaxman, and works connected to or inspired by the Divine Comedy, including a collection of poems by Vittoria Colonna (1548) and a treatise by Lucrezia Marinella (1601).
“The exhibit includes medieval, early modern, and modern illustrations of the Divine Comedy, ranging from 13th-century illuminations to Sandro Botticelli’s and William Blake’s illustrations. Finally, the exhibit displays works that explore the reception of Dante’s masterpiece across cultural contexts, with works from countries including Spain and France. Examples from the African American community are represented, as well.” [. . .] — University of Arkansas News, October 5, 2021
See more information about the exhibit here.
“Marking the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, the exhibition of approximately 100 works in various media explores the visual nature of the Divine Comedy, which has inspired scholars and artists alike, from medieval times through today.
“Visions of Dante not only puts on display a large portion of the Fiske Collection for the first time. It also brings together works lent by notable institutions like the Morgan Library & Museum and 20th century and contemporary artists from William Blake to Salvador Dalí, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kara Walker.
“‘This exhibition reasserts the continued vibrancy of the Divine Comedy as a work of art, a work of literature, and shows the many ways in which visual artists have made their own personal interpretations and translations of that original text,’ says co-curator Andrew C. Weislogel, the Johnson’s Seymour R. Askin, Jr. ’47 Curator of Earlier European and American Art.” [. . .] –Susan Kelley, Cornell Chronicle, September 29, 2021
The exhibit is held at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and runs from September 14 – December 19, 2021.
See more information and view an online version of the exhibit here.
“A young troubled man who finds himself living on the streets with a gun in his mouth and nowhere to go is given hope for a new life when he is taken in by a streetwise bum named Vern. Dante is introduced to the underground world of the homeless, the Crazies, where a bum can stay for the month of May and won’t need any money. A sanctuary for all those who have been forsaken. . . If only it were that easy. When corrupt politicians, drug dealers and an insane cult leader begin fighting for power, the meek homeless become nothing more than pawns in a malicious game of power. “I thought being homeless would be really easy,” Dante thinks, as him and Vern set off on their journey to fight the evil forces bent on corrupting the minds of the homeless. ” [. . .] –Rusty Cage, Indiegogo (retrieved October 18, 2021)
The series was started by Rusty Cage in 2018 and is currently on the third of eight planned installments.
“Faylita Hicks chose to pair the card Judgement with Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, not just for the shared themes of self-reflection, awakening, and (obviously) judgement, but to bring to mind the question: who is doing the judging? Who is absolved, who is deemed guilty, who is held above those scales entirely? Dante reaches out in very human sympathy to those eternally damned for very human flaws, while the shade of Virgil, unmoved, places a restraining hand upon his shoulder.” —charminglyantiquated
This submission comes from a project called The Literary Tarot: see the Kickstarter page for the project here.
Contributed by Kendra Gardner, University of Kansas ’22
